Review: Iomega MiniMax, 250GB
"Though Apple’s Mac mini isn’t quite as popular as the iPod, it has attracted its share of third-party accessory vendors. In fact, there are at least five major storage companies now making desktop hard drives designed to sit beneath this ultra-compact Mac. The latest company to ship such a device is Iomega, whose speedy MiniMax drive (Best Current Price: $209.26) not only increases the amount of available data storage, but also features an integrated hub which doubles the amount of available USB and FireWire 400 ports available to you. "

The review mentions the price per gigabyte being $1.00. Has anyone ever tried figuring out what Mac mini drive has the lowest price per gigabyte in the same capacities? It might be a useful number to have for people still looking for one.

Price per gigabyte is almost meaningless with these external drives. The bigger the drive the lower the ppg. The various enclosures don't differ that much in price, but the cheapest ppg would come from buying an empty enclosure and putting in your own HD.

I usually look at price per Gig before buying a drive, but I don't get too hung up on it.

I'd likely buy the 300GB drive even though it has the highest $/GB. The 300GB+ models comes with a fan. By the time I fill a 300GB drive the higher priced drives will have come down enough. I would be further ahead buying a 500GB+ replacement drive down the road.

I stand corrected; larger drives aren't always cheaper per gigabyte. I forgot that drives that are larger than what most people will buy cost more because they make fewer of them - economies of scale. This applies in a big way to 2.5" drives; anything over 80 mb costs an arm and a leg. Another trend I'm noticing is that drive manufacturers are now dropping the 8 mb cache option from their smaller capacity drives. I have a great Samsung Spinpoint 80 gb, 8 meg cache drive in my Cube (quietest drive I've ever had), and I wanted to get another one to stick in my ministack. Can't get 'em anymore; the smallest drive Samsung makes with an 8 meg cache is 200 gb. You can still get the smaller drives and they're very cheap, but only with the 2 meg cache. I guess they figure that anyone who wants cheap, low capacity drives isn't going to care about the cache._________________Mini 1 (2012): 2.3 ghz Core i7; 10gb RAM, Corsair 240gb SSD, 500gb Seagate XT
Mini 2 (2009): 2.26 ghz Core 2 duo, 8gb RAM, 500gb SSD running Ubuntu
Also a 13" MacBook Air, 21.5" i5 iMac & 11.6" Acer 1810TZ running Ubuntu, openSUSE & Crunchbang